Chart entered : 19 May 1984
Chart peak : 50
After a seven year run of hits it was time for the Rats to head off into the sunset. The Rats had been in steady decline since "Banana Republic" - their finest moment - left the Top 10 at the beginning of 1981. Although the LP "Mondo Bongo" reached their highest position in the album charts ( 6 ) the follow up single "The Elephant's Graveyard ( Guilty)" failed to make the Top 20. Bob Geldof torpedoed their US chances by being unable to resist insulting the out-of-touch record executives who came to check them out and "I Don't Like Mondays" remains their only US hit. In the summer of 1981 guitarist Gerry Cott quit the group in protest at their dabbling in reggae though he had distanced himself from the group for some time. Their first single without him, "Never In A Million Years" stiffed at number 62 and although the follow-up "House On Fire" ( a cod-reggae track memorably described by Smash Hits as "more Lenny Henry than Gregory Isaacs" ) made the Top 30 in spring 1982 , the third single "Charmed Lives" flopped altogether. the album "V Deep" only got to number 64. With the writing clearly on the wall for the group Bob diversified into acting , playing Pink in the film version of Pink Floyd's The Wall in 1982. He also had to watch from the sidelines as his girlfriend Paula Yates became a major TV personality on The Tube. The group recorded their final album "In The Long Grass" in 1983 but had a long struggle with their label to get it released. The first single from it "Tonight" scraped to number 73 at the beginning of 1984.
This was the second single. "Drag Me Down" is an entirely vacuous example of mid-eighties production pop with only Bob's voice to tell you its The Rats at all. Bob was a fan of Duran Duran and you can hear that in the synth-y sheen and the contrived "Dee-Dee-Dee-Dee Woh oh woh " chants that constitute the song's hook line. The lyrics are vaguely saucy -"My soul's in your wrist" - but mostly meaningless. It was a success of sorts improving on its predecessor's showing but why they decided to include it in their Live Aid set God only knows.
The single did nothing to improve the album's fortunes ; it remained outside the chart. They tried again in the autumn with "Dave". The song was about the band's regular sax player Dave McHale who'd suffered a nervous breakdown after his girlfriend died of an overdose. Putting aside the hideous irony of it now, the song was obviously heart-felt at the time but it's utterly generic in its moody synth rock with a chorus that's as mundane as its title. Pete Briquette tries on the fretless bass for size but that's the only point of interest.
A couple of weeks after its release Bob saw the Michael Buerk report on the Ethiopian famine and the rest is history as far as he was concerned. The other Rats were on the Band Aid recording and their presence in the video and on the sleeve has provided fruit for trivia questions ever since. At the beginning of 1985 Mercury looked to capitalise on Bob's return to prominence and squeezed a fourth single off "In The Long Grass " in the form of "A Hold Of Me". A horribly and over-produced Celtic rocker with mock-heroic lyrics, it sounds like Then Jericho with a chord progression pinched from Status Quo's Whatever You Want . It was the last Boomtown Rats single and probably the worst. Even with Bob's sky-high profile it couldn't scrape into the Top 75.
With no hope of persuading Mercury to finance another LP the group were in limbo. Apart from his work preparing for Live Aid , Bob had another film to promote ,"Number One", in which he played a snooker ace. It didn't exactly set the box office alight and apart from the odd cameo as himself Bob has hardly ventured into the acting world since.
Bob of course put The Boomtown Rats on the bill at Live Aid and they received a warm response although you could say that was probably for their front man's achievement rather than their music. Just under a year later they gave their final performance at the Self Aid concert in Dublin to raise awareness of Ireland's chronic youth unemployment problem.
With the band put to bed Bob could now concentrate on a solo career and making a bit of money for himself. He published his autobiography Is That It ? in the summer of 1986 which was well-received. In the autumn he released his first solo single "This Is The World Calling" co-written by Dave Stewart amid a blaze of publicity. It's a lumpy stab at a universalist anthem which deploys an all-star female chorus ( Annie Lennox, Maria McKee, Alison Moyet ) to try and mask that this is mid-eighties studio pop at its most arid. The portentous lyrics are another minus; the line "There's no one who's as good as you" makes me squirm every time. An underwhelmed public made it a number 25 hit, a poor return after all the hype.
The album "Deep in the Heart of Nowhere" followed a month later. Bob was aided by a plethora of star guests which is never a recipe for great music. Thankfully it wasn't full of the overblown preachy songs you might expect. Bob explores a range of contemporary pop styles - "The Beat of the Night" sounds like he's been listening to The Pet Shop Boys' West End Girls - and some of it is quite listenable but it's too long and lacks any killer tunes. It's solitary week at number 79 indicated that solo stardom wasn't exactly beckoning. The follow up single "Love Like A Rocket" was co-written by Stewart and is an attempted sequel to Waterloo Sunset but its mediocre synth pop sound ( with superfluous Eric Clapton guitar solo ) meant it didn't get past number 61 in the charts. The third single, the ridiculously over-wrought death ballad "I Cry Too" sounds like Ultravox trying to re-write Hot Chocolate's Emma and didn't chart.
Bob laid low for the rest of the decade as his wife gave birth to two more daughters but resurfaced in June 1990 with the single "The Great Song of Indifference". A calculated kiss-off to Saint Bob - "Baby I can watch whole nations die" - its Lou Reed meets The Chieftains vibe somehow caught the public imagination , fuelled further by the bizarre inclusion of a short middle aged man with a comb-over doing a straight arm jig to the instrumental breaks in his backing band ( which also included Pete back on bass ). It reached number 15 and propelled the album "The Vegetarians Of Love" to number 21. This was the peak of his solo career. The album was listenable but heavily derivative. Van Morrison was the most obvious influence though there were bits of Chris Rea in there as well. Neither of the follow- up singles, the Stewart co-write "Love Or Something" which sounds suspiciously similar to Dire Straits ' Walk Of Life, or the dreary VM knock-off "A Gospel Song", made the charts despite their amusing videos which used the little guy for comic effect.
If Bob's commercial fortunes were on a modest upswing , the rise in his financial fortunes a year or so later was spectacular. His television company Planet 24 hit immediate paydirt with The Big Breakfast on Channel Four and he went from being virtually skint to a millionaire almost overnight. No wonder his next LP was called "The Happy Club" with Bob sporting comedy beard and wacky clothes on the cover . The lead single "Room 19 ( Sha La La La Lee )" quotes so much from Morrison's Brown Eyed Girl it must be some sort of tribute. The second single "My Hippy Angel" is forgettable, bland, pop rock. Neither were hits and neither was the parent LP. The title track ( passable ) was co-written with World Party's Karl Wallinger and his influence can also be detected in "A Hole To Fill". The LP also includes "Too Late God " the song he co-wrote with Freddie Mercury and sang at his tribute concert. The words about middle aged angst - ironic as Freddie didn't quite get there - are quite smart but the tune sounds like Hollywood Beyond's What's The Colour Of Money ? The album has its moments but overall is flabby and complacent.
In 1994 he released the single "Crazy", a new track to promote Loudmouth - The Best of Bob Geldof and the Boomtown Rats. With Sting joining in on the chorus it's crushingly dull, Bob mumbling along to a backing track that seems to belong in the mid-eighties. It's his last hit to date clocking in for a single week at number 65. The album reached number 10 and a re-release of "I Don't Like Mondays" reached number 38.
If "Crazy" suggested middle-aged complacency was creeping in, Bob was soon jolted out of it. It's hard to think anybody reading the post won't know all this already but here goes. In 1995 Yates somehow persuaded Inxs singer Michael Hutchence to leave his supermodel girlfriend and shack up with her and the three girls. She and Bob were divorced the following year. Bob managed to put it behind him and record a comedy version of "Rat Trap" with the subversive puppet Dustin The Turkey which was Christmas number one in Ireland though it didn't register elsewhere.
In 1997 Hutchence was found hanged in what's widely believed to be an auto-asphyxiation experiment gone wrong though Yates fiercely denied this - at least at first - believing an angry phone call between Bob and Hutchence had triggered his suicide . Bob won his custody battle shortly afterwards and Yates died of a heroin overdose a couple of years later. Bob assumed the legal guardianship of Yates and Hutchence's daughter so she could be with her half-sisters , a gesture which gold-plated his heroic status. Indeed the dignity with which he conducted himself throughout the whole sorry saga in the full glare of the tabloids was astonishing. He quickly became an advocate for father's rights.
Bob returned to the studio again in 2001 and recorded "Sex Age & Death" at Roger Taylor 's home studio with Pete as producer. To say the album may have been cathartic is something of an understatement. The opening track and single "One For Me" and "Inside Your Head " attack Yates and Hutchence with unremitting ferocity and "Mind In Pocket" 's similarity to Inxs surely isn't a coincidence. Elsewhere the lyrics scream "mid-life crisis" as does the cover of a young blonde girl, bra slipping and riding on top. It's quite a powerful piece of work but, as with Roger Waters, the lyrics take such precedence over the music which is pretty threadbare at times. There's nothing that compels a second listen. Despite a fair amount of publicity - I remember listening to Bob discussing it on Radio Two - it didn't sell.
Bob spent the next decade outside the recording studios. He reactivated the campaign for debt relief often in tandem with Bono. He participated in the TV series Grumpy Old Men. In 2004 he organised the Band Aid 20 recording and a year later the Live 8 concert although the rather vague rationale behind the latter didn't go without criticism. He compiled his solo work for the box set "Great Songs of Indifference" and went out on tour . He came back to earth with a bump in Milan in July 2006 when he found that the concert promoters hadn't bothered selling any tickets and only 45 people turned up.
Bob took something of a back seat in the later noughties as his daughter Peaches developed her media career but returned to the studio in 2011 for "How To Compose Popular Songs That Will Sell". The over-ironic title doesn't do him any favours but the music is OK, a surprisingly mellow collection of reflective songs mixing modern production with the odd knowing sixties reference. It checked in at number 89 for a week.
When Ultravox re-formed in 2008 Bob told his friend Midge Ure "I can't do that with The Rats. It would be too cheesy". Nevertheless that's exactly what he and Pete did five years later, recruiting drummer Simon Crowe and guitarist Garry Roberts for a tour of the UK and Ireland. A new compilation album came out containing two new tracks "The Boomtown Rats" a techno chant and "Back To Boomtown" which sounds like a mid-80s power ballad. Neither are very good. The band have been put on ice since the shocking death of Peaches Geldof in 2014.
Besides working with Bob since 1990, Pete is a successful record producer , scoring a number one album in France with the singer Renaud in 2009.
When the Rats split up first time round , Simon and keyboard player Johnnie Fingers formed a trio with a Japanese singer called Yoko ( not that one ). They released two singles in 1987 , "Play To Win" and "Remember " . I've only heard the first one. It's over-produced and Simon's not got a very interesting voice but it's not a bad song in an A-ha style. They went nowhere and split up. Well Simon and Johnnie did . Johnnie married Yoko and moved to Tokyo where he's made a name for himself as a songwriter, producer and promoter of the Fuji Rock Festival, Japan's equivalent to Glastonbury. He's made some new music under the names Greengate and Ruffy Tuffy but none of it's made it on to Youtube yet. Johnnie was uninterested in joining the re-formed Rats in 2013.
Simon on the other hand left the music business and became a clockmaker in Devon . He unsuccessfully sued Bob for unpaid royalties. In the early 2000s he became a member of a Celtic instrumental band Jiggerypipery.
Garry , who could have walked down the streets unmolested even at the height of the Rats' fame , initially became a sound engineer and went out on tour with Simply Red and OMD in that capacity. He then became a financial adviser for 15 years. In 1998 he renewed his friendship with Garry in a jazz and blues band called The Velcro Flies ( no recordings ) and switched careers again , becoming a central heating engineer. From 2008 he and Simon started trading on their past under various trademark-dodging names like "The Rats" before taking Bob's call in 2013.
Gerry had a brief solo career . Given that one of his stated reasons for leaving The Rats was that they had strayed too far from their R & B roots, it's surprising that none of his solo singles reflect that concern. His debut single in early 1983 "Ballad of the Lone Ranger" is a slow stately synth ballad like The Cars' Drive ( which it pre-dates ) . It got some airplay but wasn't really melodic enough to succeed. Gerry stuck with the Americana theme for the next single "Pioneers", a rhythmically awkward piece of Fairlight pop with a rather nice whistling refrain. His final single the following year "Alphabet Town" was a minor hit in Canada and sounds like 70s singing actor Brian Protheroe doing a number with New Order.
All three singles had something to commend them but it just didn't happen for Gerry.
Instead he built up a successful business supplying trained animals for TV and film work. In 2010 he released a one-take solo album of acoustic guitar music "Urban Soundscapes". He appeared on stage with Bob in 2011 but declined to join the re-formed group.
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